Technology Guardian: Unlike most of the people I talk to, you've been in this business longer than I have!

Jeff Raikes: [Laughs] I started on VisiCalc in June of 1980 - I actually worked for Atari briefly, when I was finishing up college. I ended up spending more in the company store than I made in income, so it's probably a good thing I moved on. Atari at that time was owned by Warner, so you could buy all the music albums for like a dollar.

TG: Did you write the 1985 memo that Bill Gates sent to Apple, saying you ought to license Mac OS to make it an industry standard. (scripting.com/specials)

JR: I did. It's funny, there's a great irony in that memo in that I was absolutely sincere in wanting the Macintosh to succeed, because that was the heart of our applications business at the time. And Apple somehow decided it was a devious plot and that I was the devil.

The irony is that I think if they'd taken the advice in the memo, we'd probably have ended up seeing the Mac be more successful and Windows perhaps not quite as successful, so I guess it all worked out OK in the end!

TG: And you're still in applications, which is amazing after all these years.

JR: It's amazing to see how the opportunity has grown. If in 1981 we'd said that there would be 500m people using Microsoft Office tools, people would have thought we were nuts. Yet today, I look at the landscape, at the broad opportunities of impacting how people find, use and share information; at the explosion of content, and how people manage content; at software as a service to enhance the information work experience. I'm amazed at how much opportunity I had, and how much there is.

TG: Is that 500m paid up users?

JR: Mmm, no, that's opportunity, Jack!

TG: How do you think the take-up of the new Office ribbon interface will go?

JR: If we were to go by the research - and of course that doesn't always bear out in the market - it would be extremely positive. People want a results-oriented interface, they want to get things done, and the research that we put into designing the user experience was to address that issue, to help folks get to more capability and get things done faster and easier.

Then there's Office SharePoint Server, which takes the server side to a new level. Bill [Gates] and I would draw the analogy to when we put together the Office productivity suite in the late 80s - we think Office SharePoint Server will in a few years be recognised as a similarly important strategic initiative. We're bringing together the collaboration, the document libraries, integrated workflow, electronic forms, business intelligence, content management, the portal capability, and having the opportunity to build on it. Bringing that platform together is important.

In fact, SharePoint is perhaps the fastest growth business in the history of our company, we went from zero to $500m in three years.

TG: Are you doing anything with the hosted online version of Office 2003, apart from watching it disappear?

JR: Today, I don't get a lot of interest in running Word over the internet. Bandwidth is precious, and most people have Office. Nobody's crystal ball is perfect, but I think in a few years those who say software is dead will go the way of those people who said PCs were dead and network computing was the thing.

People get very focused on trying to undermine Microsoft and they don't get very focused on the customer. You have all this horsepower at your fingertips, whether it's your PC, laptop or mobile device, and you have all that horsepower in the cloud. Why not use the combination of the horsepower to optimise the experience? Do I really want to run the Word bits over my network connection, or do I want to use it to share and collaborate and so on?

At the end of the day, my point of view is give the customer the choice. Sell them on the value of Exchange as a messaging system and let them choose if they want it on the premises or have someone run it for them as a service.

TG: What about web-based alternatives to Office? Is the online element part of your empire or something that someone else is looking after?

JR: It's certainly something that's very "top of mind" for me. It's our responsibility to make sure that our customers have access to those services as part of their use of Office tools. It's about software and services, as opposed to services versus software.

TG: I wondered about that because Office is a blockbuster, but it does take a while to do things compared to the speed at which things happen on the web. Look at YouTube!

JR That's a fair point. You know, for better or for worse - and it's probably both - the core of what we do with Office probably doesn't have that characteristic, even in a web context. There are billions of documents out there, and people want tools that are compatible with billions of documents, and that have the functionality to allow people to do what they want to do. Things such as Google Docs - there are certainly some nice elements, but if you're a student and you need to do a paper that requires footnotes, well, good luck! [Laughs]

That's not to say they won't get better, but I try and temper my reaction to these things. In the same way I think our competitors get confused by focusing on trying to undermine us, instead of delivering customer value, I think we could get confused if we overreact to what might be the trend. The thing to do is to step back and say, "What is it that customers really want to do?" If you can make those predictions then you can end up with a winning business.

TG: Who's driving the XML file formats, customers or Microsoft?

JR: It's a combination. When I meet with governments, I recognise there's a legitimate interest in making sure that the way we store information is done on a long term basis. Some people say, "Hey, there's a lot of our intellectual property in there and you're opening that up for cloning." Well, we did. We decided, I decided, we needed to go forward and make these part of a standards body and address that interest.